Music Diary

In pop and rock music, the benefits of seeing a live show are largely about the experience – either the artist has a great stage show, loads of energy, or just presents a great opportunity to share a love of music with other like-minded individuals. Seldom is what happens live better than the studio representation – and sometimes when the theatrics of the stage show are highlighted the live elements are enhanced with pre-recorded elements. Of course, there are many, many exceptions to this … but for every Frank Zappa or Bruce Springsteen there are a dozen Tom Pettys or…

The advances in digital sheet music over the years have been stunning, including sheet music that ‘plays’ like a piano roll as the timer scrolls across the screen. But this is something different about this great piece of ‘live’ sheet music – it literally appears on the page as the music flows, adding a dynamic sense of adventure to the familiar ‘So What’ from Miles Davis Kind of Blue. According to Dan Cohen (not OUR Dan Cohen): I wasn’t going to go looking for the drum notations (sorry Jimmy Cobb), but I did find the sheet music for Miles Davis,…

The big news in the pop music world was how yet another of Katy Perry’s mediocre-yet-catchy songs from her ‘Teenage Dream’ 2010 record has bought its way to the top of the pop charts. For some this is a sign that Perry is some ‘queen of pop’, in the same way they bought the way for Lady Gaga to sell a million records in her first week to demonstrate … something. Some are excited about it: Dream’s singles success could prompt a reassessment of Perry’s musical chops, says Joe Levy, chief content officer at Maxim. “This just proves she’s a…

Last night I was watching former Tea Party-backed Republican candidate Christine O’Donnell walk out on the Piers Morgan CNN interview show, and later was reading a series of discussions on an internet game forum in which the two same individuals take opposing views to one another in each thread – and opposing views to themselves from thread to thread, uniting only to trash someone else in a third thread … which required them to compromise their own views from before. The cantankerous political discourse of the last two decades, characterized here as ‘The Politics of No’ can be easily summed…

The depth and breadth of music featured on Saturday Night Live in its first decade is stunning – from Frank Zappa to Miles Davis to Gil Scott Heron and many more, there was seemingly no boundary the show wouldn’t cross. They proved that for sure in May of 1978 when they featured their first extraterrestrial artist – Sun Ra! Jazz musicians are now viewed as being anti-technology, but that wasn’t always so – Quincy Jones recorded the first synthesizer in 1964, Pat Metheny was a pioneer of guitar synthesizers, and in 1956 Sun Ra recorded the first electronic piano recording….

The prevailing pop music form these days seems to be a combination of a singer and rapper, with randomly free-flowing male rap verse and largely disconnected melodious warbling from a female songbird like Rihanna. It has become such a formula that for Katy Perry’s E.T. music video Kanye West was brought in to ramble on top of the track in order to give it ‘cred’ or something. It is as though the big industry execs are afraid to let either genre stand on its own – pop-rappers and pop-singers are being melded as they fear losing the cross-over appeal of…

When ‘Born this way’ came out it was a pretty clear copy & paste of Madonna’s Express Yourself, as I discussed here. No one denies that, not even the artists – they just say that ‘everything is cool’. Of course, Madonna herself has been the subject of many lawsuits in the other direction … but more on that later. Now Lady Gaga is in trouble again, this time accused of stealing ‘Judas’ from a similarly-titled ‘Juda’. You can read some details here, but I won’t go into it anymore right now. What I thought would be more interesting is to…

The first record I bought based on my own taste was Rubberband Man by the Spinners, and have always had a penchant for funky music – but in the late 70’s got swept away from funk in the anti-disco sentiment. So I missed out on the grandmaster of funk, George Clinton, and his Parliament and Funkadelic groups until much later. Recently I was cruising my iTunes Library for recordings celebrating anniversaries this year and came across the classic Parliament recording Mothership Connection, and it has been dominating my iPod for the last few days! George Clinton is one of the…

Do you remember your first REAL concert? I sure do – I was going to be a freshman in high school, and my brother and his friends were going into their senior year. They had an extra ticket to the Doobie Brothers and I was able to grab it and join them (yeah, I REALLY just dated myself). Not only was it my first concert, it was the first time I drank a full beer, and the first time I experienced the smell of marijuana – the old Boston Garden was a haze of pot smoke and I’m pretty sure…